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Does Bob Have a Problem With Gender Equality?

I only ask because, as a female sceptic myself (and very much not alone in that respect) it would seem from his comments that he likes to think that a vast majority of climate sceptics are male; even worse, crusty old white balding men not dissimilar to himself. As principal evidence for his theory, he points to the predominance of old white men at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which Bob also appears to have a problem with, probably not entirely related to its supposed glaring gender imbalance. But hey, that’s as good a reason as any to have a go at them, so Bob dutifully decides that he’s going to report GWPF for the crime of being dominated by old white male climate sceptics – and gets short shrift from the Charity Commission who tell him:

there are no legal requirements around gender balance in governance and that under s20(2) of the Charities Act, the Commission is precluded from interfering in the administration of a charity.

Bummer. Never mind. Bob is many things, including some which rhyme with his Christian title, but he is never daunted, no siree. Bob is the self-appointed slayer of ‘sceptics’, the Chief Holder to Account of Deniers and it is no problem whatsoever to re-appoint himself to that role even when he suffers the odd catastrophic set back.

Thus, he drones on,

The Foundation may be dominated by older men because climate change denial is simply not popular among women and young people. Numerous studies have suggested that climate change ‘sceptics’ are usually older and male, with political views that place less value on the environment. However, recent polls of the UK public suggest that there is little gender difference among the small proportion of the population who are hardcore ‘sceptics’.

A tracking survey commissioned by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy showed that, in March 2017, 7.6% answered “I don’t think there is such a thing as climate change” or “Climate change is caused entirely caused by natural processes”, when asked for their views. Among men the figure was 8.1%, while for women it was 7.1%

So Bob advances a reason why old men might dominate at the GWPF then shoots down his own pet theory in the very next sentence by quoting a survey which shows that, in the population in general, there is not much gender difference among those people who seriously question whether man has dominated recent changes in climate. Having failed to validate his supposition, he then weakly suggests that “it is the men who are most vocal about their [climate scepticism] views” and that those men “tend to lack any training or qualifications in climate science, but still appear to believe that they know better than the experts”. Which is odd really. Because this describes Bob to a tee, barring the minor detail that he is not a climate change sceptic but an avid believer in the unquestionable authority of The Science.

Notwithstanding the fact of Bob’s oldness, his maleness, his lack of expertise, his apparent chauvinistic and dismissive attitude to female climate change sceptics, he then launches into a tirade of accusations about the chauvinistic attitudes of old, white, male climate sceptics, whose bigoted views apparently are directed at women climate ‘experts’ in particular, suggesting that these old, white, male ‘non-experts’ may be resentful of the fact that cleverer women in the know are telling them things they don’t want to hear. He really is a card is our Bob.

Things which Bob forgets to mention:

Male chauvinism is just as alive and healthy on his side of the fence

Two professional female scientists – Susan Crockford and Judith Curry – who do not fully endorse climate change alarmism – have suffered numerous chauvinistic attacks from male climate scientists, some of them really quite nasty indeed.

The former Chairman of the climate alarmist IPCC, Mr Hacked Hands Pachauri himself, was busted by the Indian authorities for sexually molesting his young female employees whilst he was in office.

The IPCC itself isn’t exactly a paragon of virtue when it comes to gender equality – I give you this very recently released report.

Some take home quotes from that report:

In terms of trends in IPCC female participation, our best estimate is that the first assessment in 1990 had no more than a dozen female authors and contributors, constituting 2% of the total scientists involved. The number and proportion of women authors rose over time from 26 (5% of all lead authors) in the 1997 second assessment to almost 100 in the 2001 fourth report (21%) and 182 (22%) in the fifth and most recent report in 2013. The most powerful positions in IPCC are those of chair or vice-chair of a working group. Only three women have ever filled these roles until the most recent election for the sixth assessment in which eight women are now in executive roles (of 32). Women have had slightly more representation within the technical support units and task forces that sustain IPCC.

The demography of our 111 survey respondents shows a predominance of authors from the United States followed by the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Australia (Table 1). Fifty-one percent of respondents identified as natural scientists, 24% as social scientists, and 21% reported as both; 72% identified as Caucasian/white/European, and most were over 56 y old with only 4% under 40; 11% had served in the senior role of coordinating lead authors (CLA).

While most felt that they were listened to and could influence their own chapter, many felt that they had little impact in influencing the overall report. Sixty percent reported that discussions and writing of the IPCC report were controlled by only a few scientists, and half reported that the workload was not equally distributed.

The open-ended responses, where women could provide more detail on their experiences, were less positive. For example, several felt that more work was required from women than from men, but without appropriate credit. Others reported feeling marginalized and ignored: “I felt that IPCC scientists are in small impenetrable groups. . . . I didn’t feel welcome” and found “the IPCC process to be male dominated . . . by the older established men.” Other respondents wrote that “there was no equal opportunity to contribute . . . decisions were unilateral, nontransparent, a few scientists controlled the write-up” and “the leadership . . . [was] rather arrogant and not very inclusive. He only seemed to be interested in your opinion if you were an Ivy League-tenured, white male professor.

So Bob darling, if you are reading this, please don’t go throwing stones in the global greenhouse, there’s a good chap.

45 thoughts on “Does Bob Have a Problem With Gender Equality?”

Denizens of this site are about as balanced as you might hope for in what is fundamentally a boring subject. Especially as it doesn’t trot minorities out with bit parts to prove how inclusive it is. Who you are doesn’t matter. What you write does.

Perhaps GWPF is lacking in women because they have been scared of joining, given the way the warmists have behaved before? On the net people expect there to be cruel trolls but warmists are so confident that they’re vile in front of the World’s media. Some warmists may have schooled themselves to not throw around the word ‘denier’ but they’re still thinking it. They have dreams of removing their opposition by force. And not just removing people from the world stage but removing them full stop.

Bullshit Bob doesn’t even have the honesty to link to the GWPF report he is talking about. He claims it’s attacking the media for not giving more coverage to sceptics, but it’s really about groupthink in the climate world, as we’ve been discussing here.

It’s a very long and detailed report on how ‘groupthink’ has permeated the heart of the climate change establishment of which Bob is part. We’ve barely scratched the surface of this report here at Cliscep. But Bob’s only concern apparently is that it was written by an old white man. I’m not even sure if this qualifies Bob’s cerebral processes to be categorised under the title ‘groupthink’ – maybe ‘non-think’ would be more appropriate.

Bob relies for his definition of “hardcore sceptics” on a Government tracking survey which I intend to look at soon. I don’t believe the researchers have distinguished clearly, among the 7.6% of the population who think that climate change is non-existent or caused entirely by natural processes, between those who are keen readers of Cliscep, those who don’t believe anything the government tells them, and those who didn’t like the smarmy look on the face of the interviewer.

The problem with opinion surveys is often in the interpretation rather than the administration of the survey. The only mainstream journalist I found who cast the slightest doubt on Lewandowsky’s fragile stats in Moon Hoax was someone at Slate who pointed out that 6% of respondents in a pre-election survey thought that Obama was a Lizard from outer space, though the figure fell to 4% among Democrats. As the journalist sagely observed, there’s always a certain number who are going to argue: “Maybe Obama is a Lizard from Space, but do I really want Milt Romney for president?”

I’m not one of the 7.6%. I’m probably a hardcore climate believer, since I’d sign up to a statement that most of what the IPCC says is true and accurate, and that it’s possible (though not likely) that temperatures will rise 2°C in the next few decades, and that will be horrid for people in places like Baghdad and Brisbane, but particularly in Baghdad, because of what people in Brisbane have done to it (but also people in London and New York and France, of course). But Bob Ward is still a miserable little bald headed twat whose talents would have been much appreciated in Vichy France or some 19th century backwater of the British Empire, and who is obviously suffering from frustration that he cannot exercise them to the full in a society which still believes halfheartedly in freedom of expression. Tomorrow doesn’t belong to you, Bob. Not yet.

All this to say that the government survey doesn’t really tell us much.

I thought Bob had denied the rumour that he played in Dexy’s in the ’80’s? No matter, he’s still banging the drums of climate alarmism today and assiduously calling out sceptics for the crime of spreading climate change disinformation whilst being pale and male and the wrong side of 40.

Don’t let age bother you Alan. In today’s enlightened society, we can all choose to self-identify as 21, just as we can choose to self-identify as elves, hobgoblins, fairies, male/female, black, brown, or sky-blue pink. This is why Bob’s accusation of gender imbalance at the GWPF should not be taken at face value. GWPF could be a lot more diverse than he thinks.

Alan – Does Bob Ward actually do anything, or is his role merely to irritate? – in which case he Is underpaid.

This is surely the enduring mystery… How can a PR be so terribly bad at the job. There are the rumours that he was sacked from the Royal Society after the no less climate-aggressive president Bob ‘I am the president of the Royal Society and I’m telling you it’s true’ / ‘Nullius in Verba’ May finished his stint. This notion was supported by his successor at the RS who tweeted in an online dispute that Ward had left a mess to clear up. This interpretation is denied by Ward who says the idea he was sacked is an Exxon conspiracy. After the RS Ward went to insurance risk modellers RMS for five minutes, and then the CCCEP/Grantham/LSE gig.

The only logic I can see to it is the logic of all consensus enforcement: to visibly signal to anyone in public life contemplating expressing an opinion that it better be the right opinion, or letters will be written to employers/clients and to their regulators on RS/LSE headed notepaper, visits will be paid to family, social media accounts will be stalked and copied onto online ‘denier databases’, and stuff will be written about them in dying newspapers. because ‘climate change is real’, and anyone denying the fact — i.e. people who think that wind turbines aren’t quite as good as their manufacturers’ PR firms (English Lit grads on secondment from green NGOs) claim — obviously is an evil bastard.

It makes sense, in a way, to put someone like Bob, or any of the Consensus Enforcers between architects of climate policy like Stern and their critics. Stern — who was more famous for his (VP of human resources) brother at the World Bank get him a job (in spite of WB rules forbidding it) than as an economist in his own right — obviously cannot lower himself to debate. Because that would by implication raise sceptics to the level of the man who fought so hard to battle poverty and corruption (including nepotism) in developing economies.

We know that Stern is well above this level of debate, because in his own words in an interview which touches on the subject of the allegation of corruption that arose during his appointment at the World Bank, he was raised to the highest ethical standards…

STERN: And it was very difficult for my brother Richard and myself. We are very close, I mean, and brothers should be. So there was never a problem between us because we knew and trusted each other and we knew that we had been brought up with high ethical standards which we believed we’d acquired and practiced in our own lives. So we didn’t actually have any problems with the decision or how it came about. We had no reason to be embarrassed in any way.

So that’s okay, then.

The notion that the likes of Stern — or anyone in similar roles in related organisations, such as IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, the tax-free half $million per year salaried successor to women’s rights champion, Dominique Strauss-Kahn — can be criticised by climate sceptics, is of course laughable.

Apart from saving us from climate change, Stern’s ninth job last year was making sure that all the public money for research is spent properly by universities. Meanwhile, it was alleged by some scurrilous sceptics that the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP), which Stern chairs, and where Ward is the Director of Policy and Communications, might have been fraudulently claiming that research produced by academics that have nothing to do with CCCEP had been used to further its application for £millions in grants, and in elevating its profile.

The funding body for the CCCEP, ESRC, which has awarded nearly £10 million to CCCEP was chaired by one Adair Turner when it decided the CCCEP was needed to support the forthcoming Climate Change Committee (CCC), which Turner then chaired. The creation of the CCC itself was mandated by the Climate Change Act, 2008, which was the response to the Stern Review of the economics of climate change… Which was of course authored by Stern.

Let’s be clear… I’m not accusing any of these people of enriching themselves. I am entirely sure that Turner is concerned that the heated swimming pool at his Kensington mansion (his second home) does not cause any undue suffering via climate change to poor people. And I’m equally sure that Stern is also only thinking about poor people when he takes advisory roles at private financial and investment organisations for undisclosed sums. It is a good thing that we have people with such high ethical standards in non-elected offices, and in the Lords, and in so many positions of influence, and that these (old, white, rich) men are beyond the reach of criticism…

I think it’s quite apt. It’s an advert for chocolate that has nothing whatsoever to do with chocolate. A similar disconnect exists between climate science and whatever exists on the other side of the swamp of postmodern meaninglessness that Bob inhabits.

Ben. Thank you for much pleasure. Yes it has nothing to do with the product, but who cares? It’s a fabulous concept produced professionally and instantly memorable. The problem is in maintaining a link between advert and product. I had forgotten the link with chocolate (but it was instantaneously restored). Its similar to other advertisements (horses in the foam and Guinness; trampolining dogs and John Lewis(?).

Jaime,
One thought that comes to mind is that “climate change”, like other religions, has a self selected male priesthood.
Ward, being climate change defender if the faith, has a limited view and comfort level with women and his faith in general. Perhaps he simply cannot deal with the idea of women participating in the working of his faith. And certainly women heretics are beyond the pale.
Nothing a good witch burning wouldn’t help Bob feel better about.

Nobody. Nobody, excepting those who don’t expect to be annoyed by adverts, that is.

But the question is… what is the connection between Ward’s bleating about gender (non) balance of the GWPF and Booker’s report?

I’d suggest they’re doing similar things. Except, one is a bit of fun, intended to vaguely provoke attention to a brand of chocolate. The other is no less a connected and surreal product, but its departure from reality is darkly banal propaganda.

The inconvenient truth is that the birth and development of the entire global warming theory/hypothesis is exclusively down to the efforts of white European and North American male scientists. From Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius and Angstrom to Broecker, Hansen, Mann, Jones, and Trenberth. It’s only very recently that women have been admitted as honorary members into the priesthood. Not to be outdone by their male counterparts, they are proving to be every bit as zealous, if not more so.

Bob Ward is a “Policy and Communications Director“. In the language of a previous era he is a propagandist. He starts with a false statement.

On 20 February, the Global Warming Policy Foundation launched a new pamphlet at the House of Lords, attacking the mainstream media for not giving more coverage to climate change ‘sceptics’.

There is no link to the GWPF, nor even the name of the report (GLOBAL WARMING : A case study in Groupthink), so you cannot validate his statement. He then goes on make a number of reasons why the reader should discriminate against the GWPF – or at least fail to stand up for their right to voice opinions that contradict the mainstream.

Similarly, Bob Ward makes long-winded and spurious complaints whenever someone associated with the GWPF gets a fair hearing in the media. It achieves the propagandist’s purpose of silencing the target group, by making sure that both the target and any media outlet who gives them a voice, are tied up in complex complaints procedures and disproving nonsense. The fact that the likes of Bob Ward gain prominence in climate communication should prompt some questioning of whether there is real substance behind CAGW or the case for mitigation policy. In terms of the economic Benefit-Cost case for climate mitigation, it was Ward’s boss who headed The Stern Review. The economic case fails from a number of different perspectives.

One item quoted the Met Office predicting that ‘even if global temperatures only rise by 2◦C, 30–40 percent of species could face extinction’. A graph from the US Environmental Protection Agency showed temperatures having soared in the past century by 1.4◦C, twice the generally accepted figure. The only hint that anyone in the world might question such statements was an article by an environmental correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, Louise Gray (who had previously worked for WWF). This quoted a paid PR man for the cause, Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute, dismissing ‘climate sceptics’ as ‘a remnant group of dinosaurs’ who ‘misunderstood the point of science’.

In reporting all this I commented:

In the days when one purpose of education was to teach people to examine the
evidence and to think rationally, any bright student might have had a field day,
showing how all these extracts were no more than one-sided propaganda. But
today one fears they would have been marked down so severely for not coming
up with the desired answers that they would have been among the tiny handful
of candidates given an unequivocal ‘fail’

Maybe Bob Ward would not like to substantiate the singular “point of science”, to enable comparison with such errant views as thinking rationally, and confronting conjectures with actual evidence.

“‘even if global temperatures only rise by 2◦C, 30–40 percent of species could face extinction’

How did all of those pesky species ever survive the Holocene one might wonder, such drivel from the defunct Met Office that cannot even keep a BBC forecasting contract, how bad do you have to be to lose the state broadcaster’s forecasting contract, when the Met is the state broadcaster

Mark,
Booker has plenty of other examples of “Groupthink”.
I would suggest that if you evaluate a conjecture on the basis of a basic of understanding magnitudes, logic and observations, then the idea that 2◦C of warming will endanger 30-40% of species is quite ridiculous. But if you evaluate evidence based on a mantra the those in the know believe to be apriori true, like “AGW is real, human-caused, serious, and solvable” (see my comments on Supran and Oreskes 2017) then you will get a totally different perspective, particularly if you have been taught to base your evaluations on the consensus of experts who share your values. Indeed, you may get pretty stroppy, even indignant when someone points out that your approach is nonsense. This is particularly when it undermines your assumptions and beliefs about the world. A prime example was when I looked at temperature homogenisation. Look at the reactions in the comments by a frequenter of this blog when I concluded that the key assumption that makes homogenisation meaningful – that underlying climate trends in an area are pretty much the same, meaning anomalies are due to data biases – is contradicted by numerous examples.https://manicbeancounter.com/2015/06/27/defining-temperature-homogenisation/

The lesson to learn it that when the evidence contradicts your assumptions or beliefs about the world, then the normal human reaction is to defend the beliefs, especially when shared by a collective of people you respect. Science and other areas (such as in a Court of Law, professions) have developed standards, techniques and value systems to combat this natural human impulse.

The “30–40 percent of species” claim is one of those factoids that can be tracked through the development of the climate debate, to show how it is used and how little it owes to the original.

The slightly fuller quote from the IPCC is “30–40 percent of species assessed so far“. Which is to say that it is meaningless because it says nothing about how many species were “assessed”, how many were not assessed, and what kind of process “assessment” is, and to what extent it can be depended on to help us understand the problem.

Most notably it was Stern who used the factoid, sans caveats. And then it was former president of the Royal Society, Bob May, who cites Stern’s use of the factoid in lauding the Stern report in the press. Which was very weird indeed, because May’s specialism is population dynamics.

The figure later comes up again in argument from the Climate Change Committee, who I tried to have some correspondence with.

————
The next paragraph in CH1 [of the CCC’s “Building a low carbon economy” report] seems to have been paraphrased from IPCC AR4:

— “Extinctions of species are of particular concern because they are irreversible. Many ecosystems are facing a range of pressures due to human activity, with climate change a contributing factor [10]. However, as a direct result of climate change, 20% to 30% of plant and animal species assessed so far would face a ‘commitment to extinction’[11 ] for a temperature rise of 2°C to 3°C.” —

The IPCC SPM it is taken from said,

— “Climate change is likely to lead to some irreversible impacts. There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5oC (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5oC, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.” —

This was, on any fair analysis, a concatenation of increasingly vague statements: “likely… some… medium confidence… approximately… 20-30% of [how many?] species assessed so far… likely… increased risk… if…”, and the necessary caution should have been applied before The CCC presented IPCC work in this way. In AR4 4.4.11 we get more detail than was provided by the SPM, showing why it is dangerous to produce headlines from headlines:

— “Based on all above findings and our compilation (Figure 4.4, Table 4.1″) we estimate that on average 20% to 30% of species assessed are likely to be at increasingly high risk of extinction from climate change impacts possibly within this century as global mean temperatures exceed 2°C to 3°C relative to pre-industrial levels (this chapter). The uncertainties remain large, however, since for about 2°C temperature increase the percentage may be as low as 10% or for about 3°C as high as 40% and, depending on biota, the range is between 1% and 80% (Table 4.1; Thomas et al., 2004a; Malcolm et al., 2006). As global average temperature exceeds 4°C above pre-industrial levels, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% species assessed) around the globe (Table 4.1).” —

Worse than being merely ‘based on models’, the statement was based on estimates based on models of extinction, based on a particular definition of ‘extinction’, which differs from its ordinary sense, and was based on studies which may be prone to bias (such as choosing species which are known to be vulnerable to extinction), and small sample sizes, neither of which are quantified. The substantial difference between IPCC AR4 and AR5 statements on extinction should also be noted:

— AR5: “Changes in abundance, as measured by changes in the population size of individual species or shifts in community structure within existing range limits, have occurred in response to recent global warming (Thaxter et al., 2010; Bertrand et al., 2011; Naito and Cairns, 2011; Rubidge et al., 2011; Devictor et al., 2012; Tingley et al., 2012; Vadadi-Fülöp et al., 2012; Cahill et al., 2013; Ruiz-Labourdette et al., 2013), but owing to confounders,confidence in a major role of climate change is often low. Across the world, species extinctions are at or above the highest rates of species extinction in the fossil record (high confidence; Barnosky et al., 2011). However, only a small fraction of observed species extinctions have been attributed to climate change—most have been ascribed to non-climatic factors such as invasive species, overexploitation, or habitat loss(Cahill et al., 2013). For those species where climate change has been invoked as a causal factor in extinction (such as for the case of Central American amphibians), there is low agreement among investigators concerning the importance of climate variation in driving extinction and even less agreement that extinctions were caused by climate change (Pounds et al., 2006; Kiesecker, 2011). Confidence in the suggested attribution of extinctions across all species to climate change is very low.” —

————

Perhaps the simpler expression of groupthink theory is simply that power corrupts. There is no reason to suspect at first glance that the original research — nor even the IPCC’s assessment of the assessments — is produced in bad faith (though I’d not rule it out, a priori, either). However, the factoid uttered by Stern and May and the CCC owes very little to the science. Yet they are the (old, white, male) people charged with turning the science into policy. Factoid-based policy-making. And it is they who are resistant to debate.

It would be debate which revealed that the factoid owed little to the science, and which may even have created the impetus for better science. But since the positions of the lords, the CCC, and the policies are all already established — power — there is nothing to contest.

There are two pitfalls.

First, the easy misconception is that the factoids were offered to a debate. They were not. They count as justifications, perhaps. But they are not premises towards a proposition like “let’s do something about climate change”.

Second, another easy misconception here is that the thuggish Ward is sent out to field against volleys sceptics. In fact the point of Consensus Enforcement is more to police the mainstream. Ward — wittingly or not, I care none — signals to academics… “Do you want to be lumped in with this lot of deniers, and do you have the time to waste with me”. It is court politics, not science and politics, “interfacing”.

So BW spends all his days putting out Public Relations crap
.. and you say within 2 minutes of checking we can see it’s crap.
.. I am staggered …………… NOT

We can see his first thing is to make strawmen, and strawmen-labels to SMEAR & build his narrative
thus the very foundation of his argument is super weak, to anyone who checks things.

There are certainly a number of high profile genuine female SKEPTICS (a word with which I don’t agree with BW’s definition of that you deny established facts)
#1 Part of the reason why more women don’t raise their head above the parapet, is the INTIMIDATION that the activists like BW promote ..”denier” is a particularly nasty word.
#2 It’s my experience that the skeptic world is about getting to TRUTH, whereas the green movement is about telling people what they want to hear, and that’s sets the mode as to how many males in the green movement act. They groom females by telling them what they want to hear ..so it can be a very comfortable place for females until they realise the guys are really being a bit creepy like Brendan C ox.
The skeptic world is not like that. Indeed if you go to any science-skeptics meeting you’ll find it’s mostly men.
#3 It’s an issue that the movement has been seeking to address for the last 15 years, and it is important for us Climate skeptics to think about as well.
I do think that the way society is structured means that women are generally more vulnerable to Activists emotional PR like “think of the children” .
Our main message of “The Climate issue is not simple like you think it is” is the very opposite
As are our explanations like “Magic green energy is inherently bad” , cos it takes away money from useful things like the Health Service and old age care.
Or our other message that ‘lots and lots of people will go along with PR tricks in order to trick you’
…Having said that when you mean people who realise that the world is full of PR tricks eg old women. they seem to have the same level as skepticism for climate alarmism as men, but they are less likely to go to meetings and spend time on forums as men.
Maybe that is something to do with the male cultural things about collecting things.
#4 We still live in a world where women are pushed more into arts and men towards engineering
… And it’s much easier for an artist to just BELIEVE the narrative dreams of Greenblob
whereas you have to have something like an engineers brain to get into DETAIL about why specific arguments are flawed…See how a church seems to have a lot more women in it than men.

Thanks to Josh for his excellent cartoon and to Anthony for republishing. The comment thread at WUWT is definitely a little different from Cliscep’s! Some guy (who’s never heard of me, or Bob – unforgivable re. the former!) accusing me of having an argument with myself and declaring BW the winner because it’s ‘obvious’ that both sides of the argument are dominated by older white males. Well, yes, it is self-evidently true that the main outspoken protagonists on both sides of the fence fit this description, but I wasn’t disputing that; I was calling out Ward for his hypocrisy and his bad faith attacks on sceptics. I was also pointing out that, according to a UK government survey quoted by Bob himself, there is not a glaring gender divide among those people who seriously question whether AGW is the big problem it has been made out to be by the media and by scientists. Thus it would appear that in the population as a whole, CAGW ‘hardline’ scepticism is about as prevalent among females as males; the difference appears only when you start to look at those people who actually publicly express their CAGW scepticism. In this case, it is more likely to be older, white men than women. There may be any number of reasons for that which I won’t venture to guess at.

Maybe, as a (slightly) manic (former) beancounter I am being a tad biased, but I believe it is worth checking data claims against the original data. I have examined Bob Ward’s following claim.

A tracking survey commissioned by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy showed that, in March 2017, 7.6% answered “I don’t think there is such a thing as climate change” or “Climate change is caused entirely caused by natural processes”, when asked for their views. Among men the figure was 8.1%, while for women it was 7.1%.

From the data in the tracking survey, I found (in ascending order of importance)

1. When rounding, use the conventions of rounding. 8.17 – (46+43)/1090 – and 7.16 – (37+41)/1090 – round to 8.2 and 7.2.
2. When opinion poll experts take time to weight their results for accuracy, one should not take the raw data. On this basis, Ward should have reported 6.7% for females, 7.6% for males and 7.1% overall.
3. If males tend to be more sceptical of climate change than females, then they will be less alarmist than females. But the data says something different. Of the weighted responses, to those who opted for the most extreme “Climate change is entirely caused by natural processes“, 12.5% were female and 14.5% were male. Very fractionally at the extreme, British men are proportionality more alarmist than British women than they are sceptical. More importantly, British men are slightly more extreme in their opinions on climate change (for or against) than British women.

I have the links to check the data for yourselves. My summary table of the opinion survey is below.